My Daughter Takes on Mourdock

My daughter Sarah has written a rational, albeit impassioned, responseto the troubling theological pronouncements of Richard Mourdock, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Indiana who has, as surely you have noticed, allowed that a pregnancy resulting from rape might well be God’s will. Trust her when she says it was difficult to write, as difficult as it is to imagine -- well, no, we don’t have to imagine, we must instead acknowledge -- that men in thrall of their power will righteously invoke their God to violate the sanctity of any woman’s body and believe they can get away with it, even make it into law. With the endorsement of the Republican candidate for President, Mitt Romney. In the year 2012.

I am proud of Sarah’s scholarship, knowledge, writing skill, perspective, and thoughtfulness in writing this dispatch. Especially because I know she is madder than hell, totally disgusted and mightily discouraged. And not just because we live in a world that might actually listen to a man like this and give him place on the ballot; she’s got to wonder exactly what we’ve been doing, women our age, that we haven’t been able to “Stop this Sexist Shit” (as one of her bumper stickers read a dozen years ago) in the 52 years after our emancipation supposedly began with the first FDA approval of the birth control pill in 1960.

I don’t have a real good answer for her. I support Planned Parenthood(for providing necessary healthcare to women and as the consummate guardian of women’s reproductive rights), Annie’s List and Emily’s List (for nurturing progressive women candidates who pledge to protect women’s reproductive rights) and the Texas Freedom Network (which works to wrest back Religion’s voice -- and Reason’s -- from the so-called “religious” right which has hi-jacked it). I marched on Washington with my daughters in 2004. I am an informed voter and partisan to candidates who “get it” about women and will work to protect and enhance our rights. But clearly this is not enough. And, as Sarah writes, it hasn’t made a dent in the cult of misogyny.